Sometimes you want an application with a ton of options, and sometimes you just want to simplify. Many audio players, for instance, come with equalizers and visualizations, but if all you want is just to play the music, all you need is Neformal. Neformal doesn’t support playlists, podcasts, or other cool modern stuff. It just plays the files, one after another, in a selected directory.
Neformal has no sound processing engine of its own or built-in codecs. Instead, developer Peter Semiletov says, it uses system-wide codecs: DirectShow on Windows and GStreamer or Xine on Linux. “The main feature of Neformal is ‘just play,'” he says. “It looks like a file manager with playing capabilities.”
The name Neformal is a Russian slang word from the Perestroyka epoch for rockers, hippies, punks – any young person from the rock-oriented, rebel subculture.
Semiletov began working on Neformal about a year ago because he found existing media players to be “too over-functioned for me. I need just a plain player with some useful features – built-in image viewer, lyrics finder, advanced MP3 tags support, and a fast root mean square (RMS) scanner/calculator. RMS is a thing from the sound mastering/mixing world – oversimplified, it means the average volume level of the whole song.”
Neformal sports just one window, a few tabs, and a few options. Linux users can select the sound output device directly from within Neformal, without bouncing out to the system’s control center. That can be important, Semiletov says, because there’s a chance that the default sound device is a virtual ALSA device that resamples all data into the 48 kHz sample rate, while most music has a sample rate 44.1 kHz, and the resampling causes some audible side effects. With Neformal you can send your music to the right device by following the instructions in the Neformal manual.
Semiletov coded Neformal using the GNU C++ compiler and the Nokia Qt library – “it helps me make the program truly multiplatform. Currently Neformal has all features that I wanted. I’m just keeping Neformal up-to-date with new Qt releases, and fixing any bugs users show me.”